Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data provision system, a provision apparatus, an execution apparatus, a control method, and a recording medium, and in particular to a technique of data communication between devices for content provision.
Description of the Related Art
By using a terminal such as a personal computer (PC), a mobile telephone, a smartphone, a home-use game console, or a portable game device, a user can use various content. Providing content to the user is realized by the content being stored in the terminal to be used, for example by the user executing an application or the like that was installed in advance as a package in the terminal. Furthermore, in recent years, a method is also used in which data on content is temporarily acquired from an external device via communication at the time of use of the content without being installed, and is provided to a user.
For example, in a so-called online game service, in which a game content is provided via a network, a terminal connects to a service providing server to receive data on the game content, and then a user can execute the game on the terminal. Furthermore, Japanese Patent No. 3761091 discloses a technique for downloading a game program from another game device, executing the downloaded game program after completion of the downloading, and providing a game content to a user.
However, in a service that needs to receive data on content at the time of use of the service, such as the above-described online game service, since the content is not provided until the reception of the data is completed, a user needs to wait for the start of the provision in the data receiving state. Particularly, in recent years, an amount of data that can be dealt with in a terminal has increased along with an improvement in throughput of the terminal alone, and thus the total amount of content data as well is on the increase. That is, it may be inevitable that the waiting time of the user is prolonged if no improvement in the speed of data communication is achieved, resulting in the situation that such a prolonged waiting time may lose the interest of the user.